Ashley Richardson's Secondhand Sounds profiled in The KCSBeat

This week in the Independent‘s column on KCSB, The KCSBeat, Colin Marshall profiles programmer Ashley Richardson and her Monday-evening festival of Americana Secondhand Sounds:

Ashley Richardson remembers reading Robert Frost at her childhood dinner table. Far from a youthful literary rebellion against the conventions of domestic dining, these recitations actually came at behest of her father, a professor at San Francisco State University. This fed into interests in American poetry and Southern fiction that would develop in high school. Traveling back and forth between her dad’s Berkeley home and her mom’s various homes in Texas and Arizona, she spent a lot of time absorbing the culture around her, becoming what she thinks of as an “American Americaphile.”

“I’m obsessed with American folklore, American imagery, moving west, the open road, national identity, a nation in flux, the yearning for the vintage, all the things Woodie Guthrie sang about,” Richardson said when I sat in on Secondhand Sounds, her program on KCSB. Rare indeed is the Americaphile who’s uninterested in this land’s music, and Richardson is no exception: “Texas turned me on to blues and classic rock. The Bay Area turned me on to soul and R&B. Arizona turned me on to folk and bluegrass. Santa Barbara is a hodgepodge of more ethereal music, with its close proximity to the ocean and nature. Some of my friends here even have a ‘bliss rock’ band.” She brings her experience with these traditions to the airwaves every Monday evening.